Featured

bootleg

A closer look at the knockoff Totoro figure that will haunt my nightmares…and maybe yours too!

If this is the spirit that lives in my local forest, then I’m staying out of it.

Read More

Chinese bootleg figures for Your Name anime simultaneously look exactly/nothing like you’d expect

No really, what’s your name? Because you don’t look anything like Taki or Mitsuha.

Read More

Bootleg food, cars, and movie characters: The diverse world of Korean knock-offs of Japanese products

It has been suggested that there are no more original ideas in the world anymore, that every thought or invention has already been considered by someone before. Whether you believe this particularly pessimistic theory or not, the line between coming up with the same idea and “borrowing” one from someone else may not be quite as blurry as you may think.

Japan, like many other countries, is no stranger to cheap knock-offs of its products circulating in the global market. China is most commonly under fire for making bootleg Japanese merchandise to sell in their own country. However, today’s featured product pakuri (slang for “rip off” or “steal”) comes from Japan’s next door neighbor, Korea. The following are a bunch of slightly “modified” products sold in Korea that are liberally inspired by their original Japanese counterparts.

Read More

Of the many things that China is known for, one of them is most certainly bootlegging. Sometimes it works to our smalltime benefit by introducing us to almost familiar films and imitation iPhones, but only trouble can be bought when China’s system begins circulating bootleg bills.

Recently, counterfeit money in China has reached a point where not only are people being fooled by fake cash, money-checking machines are too, as Chinese ATMs appear to be distributing bogus bills to honest civilians.

Read More